What is Active Network Monitoring?

Network monitoring is essential to ensure that your network is secure. Network monitoring tools provide visibility into the state of your network and identify potential threats. They also allow you to take action before they impact your organization.

Monitoring your network traffic is critical to ensuring that your network is secure and your data is protected. In this article, we’ll discuss some challenges associated with network monitoring and how to overcome them.

Active Network Monitoring

Active Network Monitoring is performed by inserting test traffic into a network and observing the route it takes to a target destination over time. This type of testing is commonly referred to as “synthetic network monitoring” because it simulates real-world conditions. In addition to standard IP connectivity tests like pings and traceroutes, active network monitoring involves additional steps to simulate real-world conditions.

For example, you might inject packets into the network and observe how they are handled by intermediate devices like firewalls, routers, and Network load balancers. You could monitor latency across different network paths or observe packet loss rates along those paths. All this information can provide insight into what is happening within the network.

Challenges of Active Network Monitoring

There are several challenges to implementing a successful active network monitoring solution. First, you have to make sure your sensors work properly. Second, you must ensure that your collectors are collecting the right information. Finally, you have to ensure your analyzer can interpret the collected information correctly. Let’s look at each challenge in detail.

Sensors

If your sensors don’t send accurate information, your entire monitoring solution will fail. To test your sensors, set up a separate machine that only connects to one of the sensors. Then run tests on both the main machine and the testing machine.

If you don’t have access to a testing machine, you may want to consider purchasing a second sensor. This way, you’ll always have a backup if something goes wrong with the primary sensor.

Collectors

Another big challenge with active network monitoring is ensuring that your collectors capture the correct information. For instance, if you’re trying to capture the amount of bandwidth used by a particular user, you must ensure that you’re capturing the correct information. You might think you could just count the number of bytes sent over a connection, but this isn’t necessarily the best method. Many other factors affect the size of a TCP/IP packet, including the type of protocol being used (for example, HTTP vs. FTP), the length of the message, and even the encoding scheme that was used to send the message.

You also need to make sure that your collector is configured correctly. For instance, if your collector is supposed to collect information about every single byte that passes through it, you need to configure it accordingly. Otherwise, you won’t get the full picture of what’s happening on your network.

Analyzers

Finally, you need to ensure that your analyzer can interpret the information you’ve collected. If you try to analyze too much information, you’ll spend far too much time analyzing the data instead of actually doing anything productive. On the other hand, if you don’t collect enough information, you won’t be able to tell if your system has a problem.

Why is Active Monitoring Important?

One of the most prominent challenges organizations face today is managing their networks’ increasing complexity. With more devices connected to the Internet, more people working remotely, and more applications running across multiple platforms, the number of possible points of failure continues to grow. The result is an increased risk of outages and decreased productivity.

An active network monitoring solution enables you to manage your network infrastructure proactively. This includes identifying and resolving problems quickly to minimize downtime and maximize uptime. It provides detailed reports that help you understand your network’s performance. These reports also provide insight into how your network is performing over time, and you can use them to determine whether changes made to your network are improving performance.

An active network monitoring solution also provides remote access to your network. Using this functionality, you can view live activity on your network. You can then take action to fix problems as they arise. For example, you could close down a port that has been used for malicious activities. Or, you could block an IP address that is causing trouble. Remote access also makes it easier to perform routine maintenance tasks such as rebooting servers or updating software.

What Are Some Common Problems That Can Be Resolved Through Active Monitoring?

Here are just a few examples of common problems that can be resolved through active monitoring:

Improving Performance – You might want to monitor your network to see if there is any degradation in performance. If so, you can use the information from the report to determine where the problem lies and take corrective steps.

Determine Whether Your Network Is Secure – You can use an active network monitoring solution to identify potential security risks. For example, you might want to know if someone is using your network to send spam emails. You could then take appropriate measures to prevent further abuse.

Monitoring Applications – You can use an open-source tool called Wireshark to analyze network traffic. It allows you to capture packets and display them in real-time. You can then review the captured packets to find out what traffic is flowing through your network.

Identify Malicious Activity – If you suspect someone is trying to hack into your network, you can use an active network management solution to detect unauthorized attempts. For example, you can set up rules that alert you when certain types of traffic occur. Then, you can investigate the suspicious activity to determine who is responsible.

Detect Unauthorized Access – If you suspect someone is accessing your network without authorization, you can scan your network using an open-source application called Nmap. It will tell you if anyone else is currently logged onto your network.

In conclusion, an active network monitoring solution allows you to manage your networks proactively. By taking advantage of these capabilities, you can improve network reliability and ensure that your network remains secure.